Eataly Offers Italy by the Ounce

Eataly

If it’s Italian and edible, you should be able to find it at Eataly.Credit
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

NEW YORKERS understand full-contact grocery shopping.

They brave the madness of Fairways on a weekend, of Zabars during a holiday rush, of Whole Foods and Trader Joes and neighborhood Greenmarkets. They jostle through Key Foods and Food Emporia alike. They prepare for these trips as if for a Himalayan trek, which in New York City is called a schlep.

And they return home triumphant if bruised, because this is how shopping here is done: Got that tilefish! Got that purple kale! (Honey, you forgot the milk.)

Now comes Eataly, an enormous and enormously crowded new Italian-food market and restaurant collection that opened recently off Madison Square Park: 50,000 square feet of restaurants and peninsular provisions, with a fishmonger and butcher (and vegetable butcher) and an espresso bar, a wine store, a cheese store, a cooking school, a kitchenware department and a great deal more.

It is giant and amazing, on its face, a circus maximus. But what are we really to make of it? Is Eataly a menace (so big and corporate) or an answered prayer (OMG, they sell Barilla bucatini)? Does it represent a step forward for Italian food at the upper end of the economic spectrum of New York, or is it simply a mass-market retail play that capitalizes on the fame of its most visible partners, Mario Batali, Joe Bastianich and his mother, Lidia Bastianich?

Does Eataly strike a chord for those desirous of food made close to home, with its house-made bread and mozzarella, its fresh pasta and local bass? Or does it display carbon footprints to rival those of an airline, with its dry pastas shipped in from Naples, its prosciutto from Friuli, its October-grown organic strawberries from Central and Southern California, from Florida, Central Mexico or Baja? Is Eataly good for us? Or is it the opposite?

The short answer is: yes. Yes to all those questions in different ways, to different degrees.

The Eataly experience is reminiscent of the one Dean & DeLuca introduced to Manhattan in 1988, when its small corner store in SoHo was expanded into a huge operation on the corner of Broadway and Prince Street. (Its proprietors hope it will not be reminiscent of the one Dino De Laurentiis introduced to Manhattan in 1982, when he opened DDL Foodshow. A kind of proto-Eataly on the Upper West Side, it closed two years later.) Dean & DeLuca then was cool and vaguely exciting, a seemingly one-stop shop for an enormous amount of expensive grub and a fast shot of espresso. But it was also uncool and vaguely menacing, a seemingly one-stop shop for an enormous amount of expensive grub and a fast shot of espresso. You could hate the place, even as you shopped there twice a month.

Eataly opened in New York on Aug. 31, the first American branch of a Turin-based chain founded in 2003 by Oscar Farinetti. The crowds have been insane ever since. This has in turn brought more crowds. And it has, alternately, repelled them. As any New Yorker will tell you, there is no point in waiting in a sidewalk line for 30 minutes on a weekend day simply to enter a store. It’s not water from the fountain of youth they’re selling in there. It’s groceries.

To be fair, though: those groceries are pretty good.

There is a restaurant at Eataly that serves fish. It’s called Il Pesce, and it is hard to get a table there because no reservations are taken and the chef is Dave Pasternack, who is also the chef and a partner with Mr. Batali and Mr. Bastianich in the excellent Esca in the theater district. Il Pesce is worth visiting: Mr. Pasternack’s plates of crudo and cured sardines and delicately fried seafood are as good as at his flagship, and cheaper, too.

There is a restaurant called Le Verdure, at which it is somewhat easier to get a table even though no reservations are taken, because it serves only vegetables. It is bruschetta city there.

There is a pasta area (La Pasta, which takes no reservations) that abuts a pizza one (La Pizza, and likewise), in which silken, expertly prepared Batali-style pastas are served, as well as Neapolitan pies cooked by actual Neapolitans, in a gold-tiled oven brought in, presumably in parts, from Naples.

You can go to these two at 11:30 a.m. for lunch and get a table, or at 5:30 p.m. for dinner. At other times, you could face a 90-minute wait, during which you are, of course, encouraged to buy things. The pastas are excellent, but in a city that is starting perhaps to out-Naples Naples for pie supremacy, Eataly’s pizzas are not yet worth the time spent.

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Credit
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

And there is a first-come-first-served bar area, La Piazza, where you can stand at a marble-top table and drink wine or eat salamis and cheese as if in Venice. These tables are very tall. It can be amusing to watch servers and customers reach up to a table to get at a plate. I pass on through.

Only one restaurant, Manzo, takes reservations. In keeping with its name, which means beef in Italian, Manzo serves a lot of meat. The chef is Michael Toscano, who was at Babbo, and the menu has a lot of that restaurant’s macher flare: ridiculously crisp and pillowy sweetbreads; agnolotti to shame even the excellent version available for $6 less at La Pasta; an incredible, luscious veal chop smoked in hay, with gigante beans and speck; a beautiful rib-eye for two, with a tiny cup of beef broth as chaser, and cloudlike pommes soufflées just because.

The wine list is exceptional, the service divine over starched tablecloths that shine golden in the light of votive candles. But Manzo is at all hours in the center of a supermarket, across from the fishmonger and right outside the classroom where Ms. Bastianich teaches classes in Italian cooking. One table is pressed up against the door that leads into that room. Manzo is a feng shui nightmare. You might go once.

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But pick up dinner instead and head home to cook it, or stop in for an excellent gelato, or a Lavazza espresso and a glass of Nardini, and you may find yourself returning. In these activities, anyway, Eataly’s charms are apparent and building. Those lines for the restaurants will or won’t dissipate over time. The point of the place is ultimately shopping.

There isn’t much in the way of ice- or steam-table prepared food of the kind at Fairway or the local deli. But the collection of pastas — fresh and dry, much of the latter from Gragnano, outside Naples — is phenomenal, perhaps unparalleled in Manhattan. You can pick up surprisingly good prepared sauces from the marketing arm of Mr. Batali (these are available at other retail outlets, too), or sublime ingredients for making your own from the long library stacks of Eataly’s canned San Marzano tomatoes, marinated artichokes and peperoncini, salted anchovies and other goodies from the Italian larder.

From the bakery behind the pizza ovens: good breads. From the chocolate station up front: dessert.

Packaged meats and poultry are available, too, mostly from the celebrity butcher Pat LaFrieda, whose name is becoming so ubiquitous in Manhattan restaurants that it would not be a surprise to hear that the company has started to market meat vodka, or special-blend breakfast cereal. The name is faddish and the products expensive.

A few sausages won’t break the bank, though. On a night with a 120-minute wait for a table at La Pasta, I was able to secure the ingredients for what turned out to be an excellent family pasta-and-meats dinner, with bread, cheese and a flinty, excellent Ligurian vermentino, for about $7 a head, all in. Good value.

So, too, are some of the vegetables available in Eataly’s narrow greengrocer area, particularly a wide and fabulous collection of fresh mushrooms and, at least for these last few moments of early fall, plump, soft tomatoes.

But airlifted vegetables put the lie to Eataly, too. The Union Square Greenmarket is only six blocks south of the complex. Last week, Mr. Pasternack of Il Pesce was down there showing a gaggle of visiting white-coated Italian chefs around, pointing out the bounty of our local farms. The crowds rivaled those at Eataly. In New York City, there is always somewhere else.

An Eatalian Tour

Want to take the measure of Eataly without waiting in too many lines? Enter on Fifth Avenue and stop immediately at the Lavazza booth. Have an espresso to focus the mind. (Is it after dark? Have a grappa, too, for courage.) Forget about putting your name in for a table at a restaurant — get a baby-blue shopping basket and get to work. You’ll want dry pasta from Gragnano, near Naples. The paccheri — big tubes of durum wheat the color of gold — hold sauce well. Also, maybe prosciutto bread from the bakery and a few packets of pork sausages.

Along the West 24th Street wall, you’ll see the Market area: sauces and condiments and oils. Get something to cover the pasta and the meat. (The Batali-brand cherry-tomato sauce isn’t bad.) Next: a ball of fresh mozzarella from the bar selling same on the far side of the room where everyone’s standing at tables with sliced sausages and wine. (Ignore them!) Go south toward West 23rd Street, to the vegetable butcher’s stand. Some basil will suffice, though you might see fruit for dessert if you haven’t already succumbed to caramel pralines from the chocolate station.